


All In (A Night’s Work)

by 1shinymess (magpie4shinies)



Category: Odd Thomas Series - Dean Koontz
Genre: F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Supernatural - Freeform, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2828435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpie4shinies/pseuds/1shinymess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Odd starts his journey in Las Vegas by jumping right into the deep end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All In (A Night’s Work)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adonai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adonai/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2014. The style is a bit of a departure for me as it is based on the narrative in the books, but I kept it in line with the events of the film. I hope you enjoy the story!

The ebb of conversation rolled around me like the tide as where I’m sitting on a comfortable stool. I have had this half-crescent table to myself since the previous dealer, an older man with steel-gray hair neatly buzzed evenly about an inch to an inch and a half along the top and closer to his head along the sides, had left for his break a few minutes ago. I figure there must be some sort of problem, since the change overs for the other tables happen pretty fast, but here I am, still alone. Even with the low ante on the sign propped up on the far side of the table advertising the $5 buy in, the other gamblers that had been with me had wandered off to active tables, leaving my with my watered down coke for company. 

I had considered joining them. The woman sitting beside me was a pleasant conversationalist and had been kind enough to help me along when she realized I wasn’t much of a gambler. I remind her of the son she’d mentioned, I think, though she hadn’t said that. She did tell me about how she had been coming to the casino for several years and had taken to helping fresh players along. I believe if I ask politely, she might even be able to answer some of the questions I have. She could at least get me started in the right direction. 

And yet, even after I decided to get up and track her down a bit sheepishly admitting that she’d been right when she told me the table was dead I found myself still seated at the table several minutes later. There is just no arguing with my psychic magnetism when it decides to kick in, and that is the truth. It led me into this casino and to putting twenty-dollars of my very limited funds onto one of the casino credit cards. Then I had walked directly, but without knowledge of the destination, to this table just over an hour ago. Since then, there hasn’t been anything but the certainty that I needed to wait here and I would get the answers I need. 

This current bout of magnetism hadn’t been going badly, actually. I started out about an hour and a half ago, leaving from the youth hostel I’d found a few blocks off of the strip with no particular destination in mind. I never do when I try and use psychic magnetism. It is one of the inexplicable abilities I have that sometimes allows me to locate something or someone I want to find even when I could have no knowledge of how to find that thing or person in a million years. The downside is that it’s really just a matter of focus

I just started thinking about what I wanted to find (in this case, more information on the couple I’d stumbled over on my way into town) and started traveling. Psychic magnetism is interesting. Sometimes it can be really useful, like once it helped me find a rare coin that had been stolen from my best friend’s collection in middle school. I’ve used it to find thieves like that, and murderers too, in my work with Pico Mundo’s police department. It doesn’t always kick in, but when it does, I can be sure that I will find what I am looking for. 

The downside to it is, it really only takes a kind of intense focus to activate, so sometimes when I am trying to avoid someone, I find myself drawn to the wrong spot at the right time, and let me tell you, that can get pretty hairy. Why, once I forgot to pick up Mrs. Porter’s birthday present up until it was the day itself and I ran into her no less than five times before I’d managed to get to the store to pick up the gift I’d asked them to hold. Mrs. Porter is the wife of Wyatt Porter, the police chief. They have both been very kind to me throughout my life and I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was to have forgotten to pick up her package. There have been less savory circumstances which arose from my psychic magnetism kicking in wanted, but they are generally unpleasant and I do not like to think of them mostly.

Anyway, I was thinking of the couple I’d met earlier. I had just gotten past the city limits and while there was the general apparently collective knowledge of big casinos and big hotels and big shows to one direction, the part of the city I was in wasn’t so different from Pico Mundo, just maybe a bit more run down. It was late morning by that time, and I had not had the chance to eat yet so I ducked into a diner in a stripmall in front of a hotel. It only took me a few minutes to observe the layout and figure out that the diner (and presumably all of the other stores) were connected to the hotel. 

After I had placed my food and beverage order, I excused myself to use the restroom and wash my hands. When I finished my business in the single-room lavatory and left patting my hands dry on my pants with some regret as there were no paper towels, I noticed two people, one man and one woman, a bit further down the hall from where the bathroom was facing away from me as they looked into a frosted window for what looked like a private party room. 

The man was roughly my height and was wearing a dark red short-sleeved polo t-shirt tucked neatly into a pair of khaki pants. His hair was short and dark, brown or black depending on the flicker of the lights overhead. The bare skin of his neck and what I could see of his arms after his sleeves cut off was light brown skin and dusted with darker freckles. The fingers of his right hand were linked to the left hand of a woman only slightly shorter than him in a simple dress of dark blue that fitted close to the waist and then flared gently to just above the knee. She had it belted with something that seemed too shiny to be leather, and her hair was long and straight, a deep black no matter what the lights did. She’d pulled it up high onto her head, bearing a simple strand of pearls clasped around her neck. 

I also noticed their shoes, something I’ve gotten into the habit of doing since I originally considered retiring from the short-order fry cook life to become a shoe salesman back when I was planning on settling down with the love of my life, Stormy Llewellyn. The man had been wearing what looked to be comfortable loafers in dark brown, and the woman wore a pair of short heels that seemed to match her belt to my limited fashion intelligence. 

They’d been standing in front of a frosted window, as I mentioned, and there was nothing especially out of place to my first glance other than the window being too opaque to provide any useful view within. Even so, I took a step toward them without thought, and opened my mouth without knowing what I’d say, and asked if they needed any help.

They’d turned when I spoke, hands breaking and then coming back together when they were facing me, and in the brief flicker of motion, I realized what I’d found. The skirt of the woman’s dress didn’t rustle as it swished around her legs and the strand of her necklace seemed to shatter without provocation, raining pearls to the floor in a noiseless shower. The light flesh tones of her throat darkened abruptly, bruises blossoming like sea anemone, faint threads of broken blood vessels spidering out around the darkest finger-shaped marks. The man looked almost the same at first, until I realized that the red of his shirt was darkening at his left breast and saw a flash of white through a hole which had not been there a moment ago. 

We stared at each other as I observed their transformation and then I closed the distance between them to stand beside them, keeping a respectful distance between myself and the woman. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, voice subdued but steady, dipping my head. 

The woman stared into my eyes, her own dark eyes blood-shot from her violent death for the first few seconds before her expression softened and the damaged red receded. At the lower half of my field of vision I watched the bruises marring her flesh withdraw until she was once more unblemished and wearing a strand of lovely pearls. She placed a hand on my elbow, then, and squeezed it gently in what I believe was reassurance.

If you are unfamiliar with my earlier chronicle about the bodachs and the fungus man, I should probably let you know that I can see ghosts. It’s another one of those inexplicable powers I mentioned earlier. They never speak; I don’t know why. That doesn’t mean we don’t find ways to communicate with each other, though, and the woman with the pearls gave me enough information to ask the waitress about when I got to my seat, and her information was more than enough to go on for my psychic magnetism. 

That all brought me here, sitting on one of the most comfortable stools I’d ever encountered in my life at a blackjack table with no dealer. At least I had some company now: a dark-haired man, maybe a few years older than me, had come up to lean against the bar one stool to my right facing me with one elbow propped on the table. He was light skinned, dark-haired, and well dressed. Certainly he looked better prepared for a night out at a Las Vegas casino than I did: he had on a suit jacket and collared shirt over black pants and well-polished black shoes, to which my t-shirt and jeans and tennis shoes could not compare even were I not also obviously young with hair that often slipped past a description of curly and into "frizzy riot" territory. He leaned on the elbow he had propped on the table, fingers stretched out between us tapping gently at the green felt covering the table.

“Good evening, sir,” I said politely. “I do not know when a dealer will return to this table, if you were looking to take advantage of the advertised game.”

The man smiled and shrugged, broad shoulders moving well under his suit jacket. Something about it seemed familiar to me. I tried to figure out what it could have been: he didn’t seem like one of the few celebrities Stormy used to follow, though admittedly I had trouble keeping most of them straight. His face was memorable though, and even if I could not remember his name, I believe I would have remembered if Stormy had showed me his picture on her phone. 

I looked him over again from his well-combed dark hair to his jacketed-shoulders to his tapping finger - and that was when I got an inkling. Instead of considering current celebrities, I should go further back. After that, it only took me another moment to realize who I had the pleasure of sharing an empty blackjack table with.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Martin,” I said respectfully, folding my hands and trying to be as polite as I could when I couldn’t fully face him for fear of someone without the ability to see ghosts hauling me out for talking to myself.

Dean Martin smiled again, wider than before. It was that smile from all the pictures, big and friendly and inviting. He was one of my grandmother’s favorite singers back when she’d been alive, and she’d made a point of playing his albums whenever she wasn’t on one of the gambling tours which had originally introduced him to her. It was a little surreal and I wished I could ask him for his autograph, but ghosts usually can’t touch anything in the living world except me. It’s another rule about these powers I have worked out. 

Then Dean nodded past me, eyes cutting over my shoulder to something beyond us and I turned, back stiffening automatically as the psychic magnetism I’d followed her resonated _this this this._

There was a new dealer headed to the table, a young lady well turned out in the casino’s uniform with the colored gold shirt and black vest. Her red hair was smoothed back into a bun and her face bore subtle but heavy makeup. I could tell though that she had been crying, because she had missed a smudge of mascara under her right eye, and she looked generally miserable. Possibly like someone whose friend had recently died and who hadn’t been able to compose herself immediately to take over for her co-worker when he had had to run. 

Dean grinned at me from the side, clapping my shoulder and moving behind me out of the way as people began filtering back to the table. I had about forty dollars after my modest betting earlier and I would probably have to make it last at least an hour until her break.

Well...I rolled my shoulder and tried to focus on blackjack. I didn't have much choice, did I?


End file.
